


Softened Collisions

by Ladybug_21



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Alec Hardy & Ellie Miller Are Best Friends, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bickering, Canon Compliant, Carnival, F/M, Gen, bumper cars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:15:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25492930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: After the trial ends, Ellie takes Fred on the teacups at the carnival, alone.They don't try the bumper cars until Uncle Alec finally returns to Broadchurch two years later.(Set between Seasons 2 and 3.)
Relationships: Alec Hardy & Ellie Miller, Alec Hardy & Fred Miller, Alec Hardy/Ellie Miller
Comments: 12
Kudos: 80





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welp, I started out intending to write something completely fluffy about Alec taking Fred to the carnival, but then Ellie just *had* to start being all angsty about her BFF ditching her. I personally consider Hardy and Miller to be Platonic Life Partners, but you are definitely welcome to read this as pre-Hardy/Miller, if you so choose. (I'll take their relationship in any configuration, so long as they care about each other very deeply and also yell at each other constantly. Yelling seems to be their Love Language.)
> 
> Inspired by that adorable scene in Season 2, Episode 5 ("Ooh, bumper cars, Hardy!"). As usual, I own no rights to _Broadchurch_.

When Ellie was younger, if anyone had asked what she was looking for in a best friend, she could have reeled off an entire list of attributes without hesitation. Someone who was funny; someone who was thoughtful; someone who was always willing to field Ellie's rants, and also someone who would straight out tell Ellie when her ideas were total shit. Honesty was important in a friendship—in any relationship, really. It was the foundation on which trust was built, after all.

(Ellie, waking in the middle of the night, breathed in the smell of her freshly painted walls and tried to ignore how large her bed felt without Joe filling up the other side. Filled with sudden fury, she slammed her fist into his pillow where his head would have rested, again, and again, and finally rolled over to sob herself to sleep.)

What Ellie never expected from a best friend was a personality that could curdle milk from several feet away; or a self-centred single-mindedness that demanded that Ellie drop everything—her kids included—to go rushing off for days at a time to investigate old ghosts. She never expected that her best friend would sneak off for major medical operations and not _tell_ her, or that he would drag her to undercover lunch meetings with a woman who turned out to be his ex-wife and, again, _not tell her_.

Ellie never expected that her best friend would drop suddenly out of her life with nothing more than a handshake. True, she herself had turned down a goodbye hug; after all, this was _Alec Hardy_ , for whom Ellie would risk more or less anything, but she still had a few boundaries. Still, a phone call would be nice. The occasional email. A postcard from one of the local shops in his new village—anything, really, to let Ellie know that her stupid knob of a DI was holding up well enough, in this next stage of his life.

 _Miller, stop fretting_ , she could almost hear him scoff; but really, what was he to expect? Even if Alec Hardy's heart was no longer in danger of literally stopping from overexertion, Ellie still couldn't help but worry that he was out there somewhere, driving some car with enough reckless fury to crash.

The winter carnival behind Hardy's rented house was closing up in a week. Tom was being a teenager and didn't want to go, but Ellie bundled Fred up on Saturday afternoon and drove out to the carnival. Fred was deemed too small to go on the bumper cars, so they sat in a teacup together, spinning aimlessly in circles, Fred laughing and laughing and then becoming violently sick from all of the spinning. Ellie, equally dizzy, cleaned Fred up with some help from the nice woman who was taking tickets and had a tub of baby wipes on hand, seemingly for just this purpose. Still too off-balance to drive, Ellie took Fred's hand and they walked out to the porch of Hardy's old house. No new renters yet. Ellie sat down on a ledge outside the front door and let her brain settle back into one place within her cranium, Fred wobbling about her unsteadily, his hand on her knee for balance.

"Where's Uncle Alec?" Fred asked, peering through one of the darkened windows.

"He moved away, love," Ellie explained.

"But why?" Fred demanded.

Not for the first time, Ellie wondered if Alec ever thought about Broadchurch and its inhabitants. She recalled Hardy's constant grumbling about the air and the sand and the town's all-too-trusting populace. She considered how, in the midst of her ex-husband's trial, Hardy had been laser-focused on unravelling Sandbrook, his attention only occasionally returning to Broadchurch and to Ellie's trauma over seeing the person she had once trusted most exposed as a murderer and somehow acquitted. But Ellie thought about how Alec had urged her to let her anger over Joe fuel her determination to solve Sandbrook; how, in his own brusque way, he had refused to let her sink into her own despair, by forcing her to muster her intelligence and strength and resourcefulness for the sake of helping _him_. Alec Hardy didn't like appearing weak or incompetent in front of others, that much was obvious. But he had drawn Ellie into the place where he was most vulnerable, where he had failed most spectacularly, in the hopes that doing so would save them both.

And, thinking back, Ellie recalled Alec's awkward attempts at comfort. The way he had staged a cleaning in a courthouse loo so he could coax Ellie out of a stall. His occasional attempts at offering reassurance, even if he truly was rubbish at being comforting and deserved every criticism with which Ellie rebuffed his shitty platitudes. His willingness to push Fred's stroller for Ellie so she could enjoy her morning coffee.

"I think he thought he needed to," Ellie told Fred. "But I'll bet he misses us, wherever he is." And since her head had stopped feeling like it was about to wobble off her neck, she pushed herself to her feet. "Come on, time to go home."

She was glad, though, that they had gone to the little carnival, had enjoyed (if that was the right word) the teacups before they were packed away until next winter. It was a way of reassuring herself that, in spite of everything—her shitty ex-husband's shitty acquittal, the surreal experience of expelling him from Broadchurch permanently, the sudden disappearance of her DI (her best friend)—life somehow would continue on, and there would be some brightness to it.


	2. Chapter 2

Two years later, Ellie had fallen into a rhythm that chugged along quite well without Alec Hardy. The fresh-paint smell had dissipated from the inside of her house. Tom's teachers at school had finally stopped worrying about his mental health (Ellie had no way of knowing that they would soon be worrying about him for completely unrelated reasons). Fred was growing up to be as normal and cheerful a kid as Ellie could have hoped, despite the melodrama of his early years. Work was going well, and Ellie suspected that she _might_ finally be up for that promotion to DI, if no unexpected circumstances intervened too dramatically.

And she and Beth were back to being close as ever, swapping stories about their kids, recommending television shows and trashy novels to one another. Ellie had no idea what she would do without her best friend. The two women were secure in an unspoken solidarity that Danny's murder and the trial had woven between them. There were some things that Ellie could only trust Beth to understand, because only Beth had been through them in a close enough way.

( _Not true_ , sniped a small part of her brain, _there's at least one other person besides Beth who went through it all with you and would understand._ But Ellie, determined to move forward and not look back, hushed the voice and soldiered onwards.)

It wasn't that Ellie actively missed Alec Hardy on a daily basis. It was more like his absence had become an integral part of her life. She tended to it as automatically as she fed her boys breakfast in the mornings. It was so familiar that she was sometimes startled to notice that it was there, usually when something at work reminded her of Alec—when Brian put his cold tea in the microwave, or when someone brought in fish and chips and Ellie caught the cutting scents of vinegar and lemon. _What kind of a Scot are you?_ she'd say quietly to the Hardy That Wasn't There, and she'd smile as she imagined his eye roll in reply.

So it gave Ellie the shock of her life when, one winter evening, she was walking home from work, turned a corner, and ran straight into Alec Hardy himself.

"Oi!" he shouted, his accent unmistakeable. "Watch where you're going, Miller!"

"Sir?" Ellie blinked; and then, without even thinking about what she was doing, she shoved him hard in the shoulders with both hands.

"What was _that_ for?" Alec gasped, genuinely startled and perhaps a little hurt.

"Oh, I don't know, maybe for disappearing for _two whole years_ without a single bloody text message, and then turning up like this and scaring me half to death?" Ellie ranted at him.

The next moment, she had thrown her arms around him. Alec, completely bewildered, stood there rigidly in her embrace.

"I thought we didn't do hugs," he mumbled awkwardly.

"Sir, I currently feel like I could either kiss you or kill you, and I recommend you keep me on the first path," Ellie snapped. "Why are you _here_?"

"Er, I'm moving back," Alec explained, extracting himself from Ellie's arms.

" _And you didn't even think of telling me?!_ "

"Look, it was a kind of sudden decision," Alec shrugged. "Long story. I've been looking at houses all day, Miller, I'm knackered. Can we talk some other time?"

"You wanker," Ellie grumbled. She pulled a notebook from her purse, furiously jotted down her mobile number, tore out the page with more vigour than necessary, and shoved it unceremoniously into Alec's hands. "Here's my number, don't you _dare_ pretend like you've lost it, and if you don't call me within a week, then so help me, I will track you down with the help of every police dog in the bloody station, you understand?"

Alec, unimpressed, tucked the paper into his jacket pocket.

"I'll see you soon, Miller," he said, and with that, he retreated into the growing darkness.

Ellie watched him retreat, not knowing whether she wanted to scream or dance or throw something violently. All of which was how Alec Hardy usually made her feel, so something in the greater cosmos had clearly clicked back into its proper place.

"Knob," she muttered, and she continued home.

(It occurred to Ellie that Hardy's reappearance likely meant that that coveted DI position was once more out of reach. It also occurred to her that, on balance, she couldn't have given less of a damn.)


	3. Chapter 3

Ellie had the good sense to realise that Hardy's business wasn't hers to share, so she kept mum until the man himself one day turned up back at the police station, in all his scowling glory.

"The Return of the Shitface," Brian quipped in an undertone to Ellie, who couldn't stop grinning all day long as she watched her DI reintegrate himself back into his former position as Resident Office Curmudgeon. At the end of the day, she walked into Hardy's office without asking permission and dropped down onto the couch across from his desk, as if the past two years had been some odd wrinkle in time and space that didn't count for anything at all.

"Can I help you, Miller?" the DI asked, folding his hands.

"Well done, sir, I think you've managed to irk literally everyone in the entire station at least once today," Ellie informed him. "Feels just like old times."

"I think they've missed it," Alec replied, deadpan.

"How was the move?" Ellie asked.

"Fine."

"Well, that's good. Where's your new place?"

"Oh, you're inviting yourself over, now, are you?" Alec said, wrinkling his nose.

"You know everyone will know within the week, stop being such a knob," Ellie sighed. "Not the same little place down by the water, I take it?"

"No," Alec replied shortly. "It's up on a cliff. Nice view. No bloody circus round the corner this time."

He stopped when he saw the grin spreading across Ellie's face.

"Miller, why're you smiling like that?" he asked cautiously.

"I just realised, you owe me," Ellie informed him.

"I _owe_ you?" Alec frowned. "For what?"

"Well, for starters, for solving Sandbrook for you, and for once bringing you grapes when you were in hospital, and for not kneeing you where it hurts when you suddenly turned up in my life again, the other night," Ellie enumerated. "You're taking me and Fred to the carnival."

"The what?" asked Alec.

"The 'bloody circus round the corner' from your old place, it's a seasonal set-up," sighed Ellie. "We're free Saturday at two, we can meet next to your old place. And I know you don't have plans then, so don't even try pretending like you do."

Ellie honestly wasn't sure if Alec would turn up, but to her surprise and delight, he was waiting there when she and Fred arrived. Ellie hadn't yet told her boys that DI Hardy was back; she knew that Tom would have very mixed feelings about it, in any event. But Fred, who was too young to remember that fraught period of his life, pulled his hand from Ellie's and slammed into Hardy's legs with a shout of "Uncle Alec!"

"Oof," replied Alec, awkwardly patting the top of Fred's curly head. "Hey there, wee Fred. I'm surprised he remembers me," he added to Ellie.

"Well, even if he doesn't, he's certainly heard enough about you these past two years to know that you're a friend," Ellie shrugged. "Come on, let's see if Fred is finally tall enough for the bumper cars..."

The carnival wouldn't let Fred drive a bumper car on his own, but they seemed fine with him riding shotgun. Alec acted as if he assumed that Ellie would be driving Fred, but Ellie snorted and shook her head.

"After all those times you made me drive you out to god-knows-where, because you weren't allowed behind a steering wheel? This is your penance, Hardy. In you get." With a sly grin, she added, "And no actual _Thelma & Louise_ manoeuvres with Fred in the car, you got that, Susan Sarandon?"

Alec rolled his eyes.

It was infinitely better than the spinning teacups. Ellie, in her signature orange North Face, was an easy target for Alec and Fred, who trundled their way around the edges of the bumper car course and crashed repeatedly into the side of Ellie's car as she shouted and attempted to ram them in return.

"See this, Fred, your mum's a terror on the road!" Alec yelled as Ellie began pushing their car towards the edge of the course.

"Speak for yourself, Hardy!" Ellie shouted back, grinning wickedly. "Nice to know this means you won't press-gang me into being your taxi anytime soon!"

Fred didn't want to leave the bumper cars when the session was up, so Ellie climbed out of her bumper car and paid for him and Alec to have another go. She surreptitiously filmed them on her phone as they haphazardly bounced off the walls and obstacles in the course.

"What're you doing, Miller?!" shouted Alec as he and Fred careened past.

"Blackmail material!" Ellie explained happily.

Alec followed up on this point once they had coaxed Fred out of the bumper cars with the promise of ice cream, despite the chill.

"Blackmail material, eh?" Alec repeated as they walked below the lines of Christmas lights stretched overhead between poles. Fred clutched Ellie's hand with one of his own, his other fist sticky with the chocolate ice cream dripping from a half-eaten cone. "Going to try to claim to the station that I kidnapped your son and took him for a wild joyride at the funfair, are you?"

"Yeah, something like that," grinned Ellie. "Although I really was more thinking that I now have evidence on hand that you actually deign to like people, sometimes."

Alec looked almost hurt. Ellie kicked herself for being so blunt.

"I didn't mean..."

"No, no, you're right, Miller," sighed Alec. "I'm not good at... all of this. Being people's mate. Being people's friend."

Ellie was about to retort that _that_ much was certainly true, because what kind of proper friend disappeared without a trace for two years? But it occurred to her that, even within the painful silence of that timespan, Ellie had never stopped thinking of Alec Hardy as her best friend. A different sort of best friend than Beth Latimer, of course. But a best friend, nonetheless.

"Miller," said Alec as they reached her car. He put one hand on the top of the car and looked down at the ground with a sigh. "I'm sorry. For... everything."

Ellie shook her head slightly.

"You remember that time you insisted on driving this car to chase Claire and Lee, when you weren't well and you weren't supposed to? And I told you that I hoped you crashed, and I hoped you had a heart attack while you were crashing?"

Alec nodded slightly. No doubt he recalled that afternoon perfectly. And no doubt a small part of him felt that it would have served him right to have met such an end, for not listening to Ellie's common sense.

"I just wanted to tell you that I didn't mean any of it, and I was a right arse for having said it," Ellie told him. "And I hope you realise that."

Alec glanced up at Ellie, still not exactly smiling (because Alec Hardy didn't exactly smile), but no longer scowling. And Ellie somehow knew that all was forgiven between them.

"I'll see you on Monday, Miller," he told his DS.

"Yeah, you, too, sir," Ellie smiled, and she opened the car door for Fred as Alec walked away.


End file.
